Mobile Tickets at Nationals Park

Wednesday, October 13th 2010 by Travis Gianchetta

When buying Nats tickets a few times this past season, I noticed an option for mobile delivery.Essentially, you could pay a separate ticketing fee to have your baseball tickets sent directly to your mobile device. While I admired the sentiment behind paperless ticketing, I couldn’t see a reason to pay an extra fee, so I opted for paper or print at home tickets.The logic behind charging an extra fee for something that, in theory, should save the ticketing agency money escapes me (how does not having to print and mail tickets cost ME money?), but I digress.

Things changed when I arranged to take my family to one of the last Nats home games this season.Long story short, my wife was planning to bring our two boys and meet me at the game.When she arrived, she realized that she had forgotten the tickets.I’m sure you can imagine the reaction this realization prompted from our 2 and 4 year old boys, who were decked out in Nats gear, and very excited for the game.

But it turns out there was an easy solution.Luckily, I opted for the print-at-home option when I purchased my tickets.If I could pull up the ticket images with the bar codes from my email account on my mobile phone, the ushers could scan them with a special reader and issue us paper printouts with our section and seat numbers for the game (the same reader they use for mobile ticket delivery customers).A couple of minutes later, we were scanned in and heading to our seats.

Disaster averted thanks to some very cool technology.The problem is, I still doubt I’ll choose the option for paperless mobile delivery as long as the ticketing agency charges an additional fee.As you can see from my story, you can forgo the mobile ticketing fee, use the print at home option, and know you can use mobile ticketing as a free backup in the event that you lose your printed tickets.